Holy Cats, I love this movie.
It’s a classic in every sense off the word and can still be watched with un-ironic enjoyment.
It’s one of my favorite monster movies.
I do believe John Carpenter’s is a little superior, but it does not distract from what makes this film fun.
The monster is also vastly different.
In the original story “Who Goes There?” the monster was more akin to Carpenter’s: a shape shifting horror that could disguise itself as anyone. At the time, such special effects were well beyond their conception, let alone execution (at least, outside of a cartoon).
As such, the monster was changed dramatically, altering its symbolism completely.
Symbolism
A lot of the symbolism of the monster relates to how the people react to the beast.
Though the monster is intelligent, its behavior is often bestial and savage when confronted, so I will refer to it as such. With the Cold War just starting out (and even alluded to in the film), and the monster behaves in the standard way 50s-monsters-embodying-soviet-fears do. He’s a hulking giant of a thing, unstoppable by modern weapons, but largely slow and lumbering.
However, unlike most such horrors, this creature is also an adept subversive agent. With it becoming the embodiment of Soviet spy fears, the compound becomes a microcosm of the United States.
The Thing sabotages the infrastructure, sews descent amongst intellectuals* and secretly grows an army right under their noses.
*Because fear of learned people among the general population has pretty much always been a thing.
The way the lead scientist, Doctor Carrington, describes the Thing really cements its status as a cold war stand in for the Russians. Not that military bureaucracy gets much better. An entire sequence listing the protocol for the Air Force’s stance on “Flying Saucers” is played for laughs early on and as a storm kicks up around the compound, all meaningful contact is lost.
“Oh, that’s what I like about the army. Smart, all the way to the top.”
Leaving the heroes on their own against the Thing, but military command structure is still the default.
In an effort to make it truly “Alien”, the creature was turned from a shape shifting horror into, as one character calls it, “An Intellectual Carrot”. The film then has to go and try and justify why an “Intellectual Carrot” should be scary. It only really succeeds when it comes to killing the weed.
Biology
The characters may call it an “Intellectual carrot”, or a ‘plant’ but given its ambulatory nature, it can’t be a true plant.
Also, the whole ‘alien’ thing would make it more ‘plant-like’ than plant. It may indeed have cell walls, but not so rigid as to prevent movement. When plants ‘move’, it is mostly through rapid growth. This is how a Venus fly trap captures prey, by growing at the hinge to close the trap.
So, this “planimal” shows many remarkable abilities, the key most being that it is intelligent. It may be a grunt soldier by the way it handles things, but it is at least self-aware.
Its body is armed with claws, or at least thorns.
Inside the fingers are the creature’s seed pods, through which it can reproduce asexually.
Despite the lead scientist’s claims, plants do NOT reproduce asexually with regularity.
Flowers, for instance, are the reproductive organs of most plants, using bees as go-betweens.
Because of its plant-like structure and high regenerative ability (it regrows an arm in a couple of hours), it renders most physical attacks ineffective.
Fire doesn’t do much as well, though it certainly hurts.
This is not unexpected.
Green plants simply do not burn as readily due to the amount of water and liquid within them. Dry plants burn best.
The diet of the creature is, however, rather odd. A diet of animal blood (let’s ignore any potential biochemical barriers an alien organism would have when encountering earthly biology).
Blood is actually a very poor diet, and consists mostly of water. This is why vampire bats urinate as they feed, to stuff themselves full of hemoglobin when feeding.
It shows no fangs in its form, and it may be the claws serve as feeding apparatuses.
Its cranium is also enlarged, probably to signify a large brain to 50s audiences, but for a plant-animal creature, its neurological system would be unlike anything else. But its 50s logic designing this creature. Like many aliens of the time, they take the basic frame of a person and just add strange powers and things to its appearance. It’s lazy and uncreative to be honest, but it’s the way a lot of people view other sentient life forms when constructing fiction. They tend to forget to subtract things that make humans really amazing, like our endurance running, resistance to heat, etc.
Speaking of heat, the full body burn done in the film was the first of its kind.
Aside from creating the earliest hallmarks of classic horror cinematography, this film also is a milestone in stunt work as well.
Just two more reasons to see this movie.
